Why Do We Need the Humanities?

At The New Republic, four former university presidents offer short reflections on why the humanities are relevant to college education. An example of the reasoning on offer:

In my experience, business leaders and employers recognize the value of this marriage and look for it in our graduates. It is clear that to thrive in a society where they may have up to six different careers, business and STEM graduates need also to be curious and creative, to be critical thinkers and good communicators.

Unfortunately, even if true, those affirmations will not increase the popularity of humanities courses. What sophomore will be drawn to a course in Renaissance sculpture because it will enhance her critical thinking skills?

Only the actual materials will sustain the humanities, but we have to believe in them enough to say so. We need more conviction than this. We need to be able to say to incoming students, “In this course, you are going to encounter words and images and ideas that are going to change your life. We’ve got Hamlet and Lear, Achilles and David, Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Bennett, Augustine’s pears and Van Gogh’s stars—beauty and sublimity and truth. If you miss them, you will not be the person could be.”

I think that’s true. As you will no doubt tire of hearing between now and the time How Dante Can Save Your Life plays itself out, reading The Divine Comedy in a time of great personal crisis gave me a new vision of life, and brought me out of that crisis. My experience of the Commedia was exactly what Bauerlein describes above. Granted, I am ideologically predisposed to agree with Bauerlein, but it took a life-changing experience with this great work of art to make the principle real to me.

I did not come to Dante in an instrumental way, thinking that reading a Great Book would be edifying. I came to it because Dante’s plotting and language set the hook in me hard. I quickly came to see that this 14th-century poem about a lost and broken man’s pilgrimage to healing and wholeness had an enormous amount to do with me. Dante taught me to see myself, my world, and my God in a new light. I could have read all the moral, psychological, and theological principles at work in the Commedia in a nonfiction book. But they would not have affected me in the same way. As I write in the book, there is now neuroscientific research showing that our brains are wired to receive information more effectively if it is conveyed in the form of a story, and not only that, but if the story is conveyed in a way that we find beautiful. We are built to experience the world as story, as revelation; beauty really is a gateway to truth.

I have told the story of my life-changing experience with Dante as a story, for precisely this reason. How Dante is not really a book of literary analysis (though there is some of that), and it’s not a connect-the-dots instruction book. Rather, I’m trying to imitate to some degree Dante’s strategy: instead of telling you “do this,” I’m showing you how “doing that” worked in my experience, and, I hope, encouraging you to do the same.

I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. I quickly became aware that I was reading the Commedia like a man lost at sea clings to a piece of driftwood, hoping it will carry him to dry land. But I didn’t start it thinking, “Ah, this Great Book will make me a better person, so I shall endeavor to read it for the sake of character building.” The trick, I think, was to have opened myself wholly to the story instead of sitting back from a certain distance, experiencing it as a literary artifact. The poet seduced me, and I willfully suspended belief and read it as if it were an account of something that actually happened. This is what we always do when we really get into a novel. I think that’s how Dante worked his magic on me.

To go back to Bauerlein’s point: I agree that we won’t get very far if we try to tell students that they should study the humanities because they will learn skills that will make them more effective at their jobs. How could you ever prove such a thing? And even if you could, it seems to me that some business school professor could come back and offer a course in Critical Thinking Skills that would cut through all the literary and aesthetic business to get right to the practical point.

It seems to me, based on my personal experience, that the better approach is to present the humanities as a romantic adventure in the search for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I had a pretty spotty humanities education, so you can imagine how thrilling it was for me to study The Odyssey with my 12 year old son, and to encounter it for the first time. It was adventure, it was joy, it was deep. And it was all a surprise to me, even though it ought not to have been.

I suppose one reason that it’s hard for colleges to teach the humanities in this way is that so many in the academy have murdered the humanities to dissect them for the sake of exposing how they’re all about power relationships and so forth. It’s like going to a liturgy led by a priest who doesn’t believe in the religion, and who uses his sermons to disenchant the congregation.

But I think it’s also true that we as a society have lost the sense that within the study of art, literature, and the humanities, there are things vital to shaping our souls, and to discovering and taking into ourselves what it means to be fully human. That Homer, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Michelangelo, and all these great men saw more deeply into the human experience than almost any other, and came back to tell us what they learned, and to help us see what they saw. In the end, I think it comes down to a deadening of the soul among our people — that is, a sense that there is no need to learn or to experience anything beyond what we desire to learn and experience, because our desires are self-justifying, and do not need cultivation.

We keep returning on this blog, in various threads, to an argument in which a number of people sincerely don’t understand why so many of us traditionalist-minded folks see the present moment as a time of darkness, or at least not a time of uncomplicated enlightenment. After all, we are healthier and wealthier than at any time in history, and many of the indicators of social well being (e.g., the crime rate) show that we are safer and more at peace, and no generations have had more personal liberty to define their own lives as do Americans living now. How can this not be enough?

Well, let me ask you: there may be no healthier (in terms of the body), wealthier, safer, more peaceful, and free than Beverly Hills. Would you describe the people living there as at the pinnacle of human history? The Kardashians have it all; they are so rich and free that one of their number is changing his sex, because he can — and some call it, without irony, and in fact with enthusiasm, a superb example of the American Dream. I think there is something to that description, insofar as America has become all about liberating individual desire from the chains of the past, of prescription, of limits, of tradition, of any bounds.

But that is a nightmare to me, and not because I think it’s yucky for Bruce Jenner to choose to become a woman. It’s a nightmare for the same reason that Ulysses’s inspiring speech to his crew in Inferno XXVI is such a deadly deception, cloaking something base in the rhetoric of nobility. It’s the oldest lie in the world: Ye shall be as gods. To read Dante is to become aware of how the human heart deceives itself, and the mind’s eye loses its ability to see.

To immerse oneself in humanities is to become deeply acquainted with the most enduring wisdom of our species, to encounter what is best and what is worst in man, to learn to place ourselves within the Great Narrative of humanity, and to discover how we can and should write our own chapter, not as passive barbarians — rich in health, wealth, and liberty thought we may be — propelled through life by our own disordered desires, but rather as intelligent men and women who aspire to live by the better angels of our natures.

You know what I hope? That How Dante Can Save Your Life is a success, and opens the door to many others, both students and older people, to reading the Commedia. And more than that, I hope it inspires other people write similar books about how going deep into Shakespeare, or Homer, or Milton, or the Italian Renaissance, and so forth, liberated them from the shackles of mundanity, and delivered them from the oppression of thinking, “Is this all there is?”

No, this is not all there is. The great humanists saw farther and deeper than you and I do. They have so much to show us. But first, we have to make a leap of faith in which we give ourselves over to their visions. We are all like Dante at the beginning of the poem, standing in a dark wood, unsure whether we can trust anybody. Put yourself in the pilgrim’s shoes, standing there looking at the ghost of an ancient poet, a man whose work you revere. As I write in How Dante:

The shade of an ancient poet appears and promises to deliver you from your misery but says that the road ahead is going to be arduous, even horrible. A reasonable man would have said to the ghost, “Wait a minute, you died ages ago. I must be having a hallucination. How do I know you are who you say you are? I have to think about this.” But the pilgrim did not say that.

Nor did he say, “Thanks, but I’ll wait here; things might get better.” He didn’t say, “How can I trust that you know the way out? Maybe you are wrong. Maybe you will lead me to ruin.” And Dante didn’t say, “Show me the whole picture, the entire map ahead, and then I will follow you.”

He said none of those things. He simply said, “I trust you, and I will follow you.” That was a leap of faith.

Though Virgil had been sent by God, via his messenger Beatrice, on a mission to save Dante, the master didn’t lay it all out for the lost pilgrim in their first meeting. Dante was in no condition to see the whole picture. All Dante knew in that moment was that if he stayed where he was, he would suffer and die—and that before him stood an authority figure he trusted to lead him to safety.

Reading those opening lines, it struck me: I am Dante, and Dante is offering to be my Virgil.

Note well that Dante the pilgrim didn’t choose to follow Virgil because he thought all that walking would do him good, or because it sounded like fun. He didn’t follow Virgil because he knew exactly where the journey was going to lead in the end. Dante gave himself over to Virgil because he knew that he could no longer stay in the dark wood, for he would die, and because he trusted the older man to take him to a better place, in the end. The Commedia is really a journey into our own hearts.

If academicians would present the humanities as romance, as mystery, as passion-filled voyages of discovery, as opposed to the dull, technocratic rationales given by these college presidents, maybe they would find more young people coming to embrace their study. If professors would rediscover why they fell in love with art and literature in the first place — the wonder of it all! — maybe they would convert others.

If the professionals approached the humanities not as scientists, but as witnesses, maybe the humanities would live again. Great works of art and literature are ghosts who appear to us in the dark wood, and offer us a way to enlightenment. But first you have to believe that enlightenment is both possible and desirable. I don’t know, I’m probably hopelessly naive here, but all I can tell you is this: I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see — and I owe much to Dante Alighieri and his miraculous poem.

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38 Responses to Why Do We Need the Humanities?

1) The idea that critical thinking skills are somehow only, or perhaps especially, taught in liberal arts classes is bizarre to this engineering/science grad, especially since:

2) This is highly one-sided, with many/most so-called “well-rounded” liberal arts graduates leaving college without being exposed to anything beyond the most rudimentary math and science skills.

3) it is much easier for me to pursue a self-education in areas of the liberal arts that I love (literature and history especially) than it is for a liberal arts graduate to teach themselves calculus or quantum mechanics.

This is not a knock on the liberal arts. I loved the classes I took in that area in college and at its best, higher education in the liberal arts is a hallmark of a great society, but trying to sell the liberal arts using the arguments of STEM is a losing game.

America is about “desires” in the sense of multiple, disjoint, instinctual or culturally induced inclinations, which never rise to the level of asking: what is my real “desire” (in the singular). Because humans have deep down ONE desire, and “desires” are often used to obscure it.

I don’t mean this to be critical of your main argument. Because I think you’re dead right that these are deep and important questions. “Is this all there is” is a really important question, and Dante is worth reading because he asked that question, and answered it beautifully, even if I might not agree with his answer in many regards. However, why is it necessary that college classes be the place to learn about Dante? After all, you found Dante when you were well into adulthood, and were able to understand and interpret him based on reading commentaries, not by having it spoon fed to you by a university lecturer. Even if you think it’s important to read great works of literature in community, there are other environments- in high school, in church-related organizations, in social reading clubs, in adult education classes- in which one can do that. As Astra notes, it is much easier to self-educate oneself in Italian literature than in, say, biochemistry.

I can certainly say, for myself, that of the works of fiction which have most powerfully influenced me and which I keep coming back to, most of them weren’t for a class. (I took a couple of humanities classes in college, one on Dante believe it or not, and for the most part they were a wash. I don’t really remember much that the lecturers said. I remember in great detail, by contrast, where and when I was when I read the trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov, or the scene with Lise and Alyosha, and that wasn’t something I was reading for a class. I am not convinced that demonstrating the value of great literature is the same thing as demonstrating that we need to spend large sums of money hiring literature professors to teach them. (And more importantly, I think our higher education system should focus less on trying to produce ‘well rounded’ liberal humanists. The time for trying to shape a well rounded youth is in high school.)

[NFR: Great points, Hector. No, one doesn’t have to study these things in college, but high school and college are where most people have the most exposure to them. And there is a much-discussed “crisis in the humanities,” which refers to the loss of popularity and meaning in the university discussion of the humanities. — RD]

be curious and creative, to be critical thinkers and good communicators

HA HA HA. I have heard this line SEVERAL times from colleges as my kids and I have made the rounds of liberal arts colleges in the last few years. In fact, we learned to listen for it and nudge each other when it was parroted. It is TOTALLY self-serving on the part of the colleges, although perhaps the college employees who spout it are lying to themselves, and actually this think is true. But it’s what the colleges say to get families to keep spending thou$and$ on history, English, and political science majors. After all, it’s not as if prospective employers have any way to measure those qualities in job applicants.

Yes, it’s all BS from the colleges; nonetheless, our youngest will attend a SLAC this fall, and the older one is at a medium sized quasi liberal arts university (MSQLAU?). And I have generally good feelings about my experiences in four years at a typical SLAC. In our defense, we all have majors in STEM fields, albeit not from large research universities.

I do find a lot of wisdom in this post, and I am one who majored in history at an ivy league university known for its business school. But it is also a university known for its wonderful history department, and I would not trade my education for the world. I have a deep appreciation for history and literature, and I cannot imagine a life devoid of this appreciation.

I did struggle quite a bit in my twenties and early thirties to find fulfilling work, and I did end up going to law school when I really should have gotten a PhD in history. But I have found a place where I belong and where I believe I am doing worthwhile and valuable work. Although I work with many scientists in the STEM fields (and my lack of knowledge in the sciences does not hinder me), I also write proposals to support the humanities. And the writing skills I learned in high school and that were honed in help me tremendously in my writing work today.

Thanks for this, Rod. (And I for one am enjoying all your Dante posts.)

One of my best memories from high school was when my 10th-grade English teacher read Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” out loud to the class. Until then, I had merely appreciated the poem. By the time she was done, it was like a personal ephiphany. If I had not been a self-conscious teenager, I probably would have wept in class. Afterwards I memorized it, not for homework, but because the poem spoke to me so deeply.

It wasn’t just me – the entire class was transfixed. When she was reading it, the school bell went off to mark the end of the period. Not a single student moved until she was done.

I actually celebrate the fact that America is about liberating the individual. That impulse wouldn’t be there if there was nothing from which to liberate the individual. Our families, our pasts, our cultures can be tyrannical.

I attended a liberal arts college (Loyola of Chicago) and even though I was a mathematics and computer science major, I was expected to take a number of courses in the liberal arts. I studied Russian Lit and got exposed to Pushkin and Turgenev as well as Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy), English lit (Austin, the Brontes, et al), and poetry (both reading and writing). I also took coursework in Philosophy and Theology in which I took a minor as Biblical Greek and Hebrew were 300 level courses. None of this changed my life. It simply made me think about the material and required that I work a certain period of time each week to finish the course work.

It was suggested to me by a faculty member that the reason I wouldn’t mind taking the liberal arts classes is that it would give me something to talk about other than work with my co-workers. Now that much is true, at least.

Now I have taken up learning to play music on a clarinet for the past 3 years. That literally has changed my life. Not because the music has something magical about it but because it 1. requires a lot of time 2. has changed the way I hear music, instead of a solid blob o’ sound I now hear individual counter melodies and 3. the ability to learn a new skill even at my age gives me confidence.

Seriously though I think Rod got enlightened by Dante because he wanted to be enlightened, he felt a need to change. Maybe if a person is comfortable where they are and have pursued other forms of enlightenment, the humanities won’t effect them in the same way.

And I don’t see the Kardashians as a symbol of awful people. Among other things, at least one of them is quite good at business and they’ve all got enough lucre to live on due to their outrageous public personae. For all you know, the private Kardashians are quiet sensitive people who play chess and whist whilst discussing literary personalities of the day.

Nor do I consider sex changes to be anything other than a person making an adjustment that they’ve though long and hard about. I wouldn’t like someone judging my lifestyle, and so I won’t judge Jenner or the Kardashians.

“I suppose one reason that it’s hard for colleges to teach the humanities in this way is that so many in the academy have murdered the humanities to dissect them for the sake of exposing how they’re all about power relationships and so forth. It’s like going to a liturgy led by a priest who doesn’t believe in the religion, and who uses his sermons to disenchant the congregation.”

Anecdote: no professor, at my extremely liberal liberal arts college, did this – with maybe one or two exceptions. In the one exception I remember the students practically rebelled against the professor.

I can’t speak for Beverly Hills and the Kardashians. But the Pacific Northwest is a hotbed of active appreciation of the humanities. The northern halves of I-5 and I-95 are probably the areas of America with the most appreciation for the humanities. And they are also the least religious.

In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that there in an inverse relationship between active appreciation in the humanities and religious adherence. Maybe it’s because we don’t have religion that our search for meaning comes in the form of participation in the arts and taking in nature.

Richard Feynman threatened to disown his son if his son pursued studies in philosophy, his first interest. He won came to his senses and switched to computer science. Modern philosophy apes science without the requisite knowledge of math and science. Studying the classics and displaying the knowledge to any degree makes someone between a freak and a bore. Study something practical and useful. People will have a buyer opinion of you.

I don’t have any sources handy, but my impression from reading Bryan Caplan’s posts at Econlog on education (he’s writing a book on the subject) is that the idea that college teaches you how to think or how to reason is pretty much bunk. The scholarly research on the subject, much of it done by college professors who you’d expect to have a pro higher-ed bias, seem to indicate there aren’t any real benefits to critical thinking skills from attending college.

I went to St. Johns College whose pitch, at least what hooked me, is exactly as you suggest,

Come here and read the great books not just to gain skills but to ask the big questions, like what is virtue, is beauty an access to truth, and most importantly what is the good life

And guess what, they are having trouble filling every available spot. The great books program at St. Johns has been around since the 1930’s and the school has never been very big.

You’re falling into the same trap you always do. Glorifying a past that never existed. The humanities has always appealed to a small subset of the population, usually some portion of elites that went to college back when very few people went to college.

Now that many more people go to college the humanities are still of interest to a small group of people. It hasn’t gotten worse. In fact, I’d bet there are a higher percentage of people reading and being exposed to the humanities in the population at large than ever, even if it is a smaller percent of college grads.

P.S. St Johns has a summer program for high school juniors and seniors that is really great as well as summer programs for adults.

1) What employers look for college graduates that are married? My experience working in an office, is the ‘Fast Track’ hires are usually not married and willing to move anywhere (including foreign nations. I knew a few married but not most.) These fast track people are expected to be like new recruits for the military and long term they will be married but not right away.

2) What are the right humanities to study? These are wonderful examples but what how Elvis Presley (& other 50s) stars took various traditional American music styles to create Rock ‘n Roll? Or how Spielberg & Lucas took Drive-In Cinema to create the Blockbuster movies? Or how Pixar came to dominate the feature length animation film? (Or how early Simpsons shows took satire and spoof humor into a short narrative?)

Can we please stop pulling out the statement “And ye shall be like Gods” as the be-all cautionary argument?

People claiming to speak with the authority of the Church have fulminated against women’s suffrage, lightning rods with pointy tops, anaesthesia for childbirth, medicine for plague sufferers, vaccines, and so on and so on. Heck, I’m sure if we went back enough we could find some village priest ranting about the immorality of the use of the horse collar by the local peasants. It’s a stupid argument. Whenever I hear “And ye shall be like Gods!” shaken in front of me as a warning, I hear the undercurrent: “don’t ever try to improve anything. Don’t fix matters. And never, ever question authority, particularly MY authority.”

Building on Hector’s argument, the real reason for humanities faculties is that only they can write the books and scholarly editions that people like Rod (or Astra, or any other reader for pleasure) rely on to make sense of Dante, or the Church fathers, or Homer, or any other great classical work from a period of time different enough to be difficult. Without harmless drudges in the humanities faculties looking up every obscure Florentine or Pisan in Dante, or checking the textual variations in the manuscripts of Homer, you wouldn’t be able to look in the notes and tell what’s important and what’s not. So no, you don’t need to read Dante in college, but only because all of those professors have taken time out from teaching to write the articles and books that directly or indirectly give you the knowledge you need to read them as amateurs. THAT’S what the world outside the universities is getting for the supposed evil of humanities professors doing research, and not spending all their working time in front of students “inspiring” them.

I deal with college students every day. The trendy theorists who have “murdered the humanities” are a small part of the problem, and the college administrators who think only in utilitarian terms are a bigger part. But here’s the biggest: students are constantly being judged and graded and forced to work to deadlines, on EVERYTHING. When RD read Dante, was there a deadline? Did he have to have a paper on it turned in by a week from Friday? Did he have several other similar demands being made on him at the same time? What’s the likelihood of a life-changing experience if those conditions apply? They are the devil’s own design for killing interest in literature and art.

AND they are the single most immovable objects, the biggest sacred cows, in all of higher education. There was some talk in the ’60s (that era that destroyed Western civilization, y’know) about “free universities” and the abolition of grading and so forth — experiments tried out, very tentatively, here and there, notably at the hippy-dippy University of California at Santa Cruz, founded at the time on the model of a kind of utopian resort / retreat in the beautiful redwood forests. In other words, the only people in the last 50 years who have even so much as called for reforms meant to free the spirit on university campuses, and to encourage genuine engagement with art, literature, and ideas for their own sake, were part of the very same movement — the very same movement — that social conservatives have so greatly feared and scorned ever since.

As to professors approaching their jobs as “witnesses,” there’s a big obstacle to that as well: What then are the hiring criteria? How do you credential “witnesses”? It’s bad enough now, with the Ph.D. as generally a minimal requirement for hiring; even so, there are 300 applicants for every decent job. If you put up an ad saying, “We’re hiring a ‘professor’ who is just really enthusiastic about books or art and can somehow express this vividly — no particular degrees required,” it’ll be 30,000 applicants per job. How do you sort through them? And then, when you’re done witnesses, the college presidents are going to say, “Hey faculty, now that you’ve abolished grading and other formal demands, how are we supposed to credential any of these students? Who should get a Harvard diploma with all the advantages it brings — the students who write the best essays describing how literature changed their lives? Ah, but you don’t require essays anymore, remember?!”

Any suggestions about this? I’d love to see major reform,, but nobody on any side or in any party is even talking about it nowadays.

I remember coming home for Christmas break from my first year in college (Moody Bible Institute – I’ve come a long way from there!) and picking up one of my Dad’s books (he was attending Multnomah Bible College at the time) called “How To Read Slowly”, by James Sire. This book grabbed me, because it shamelessly urged you to read for the beauty, for the sake of reading, for no utilitarian reason.

I went on to transfer to Multnomah and graduate there, and then went to PSU and got a degree in Math/Chemistry. I have worked as a computer programmer for the past 20 years. I did not follow Sire’s advice (at least in my career choices), I never had the nerve to live like that, but I wish I had. But then I wouldn’t have ended up with my wife and family, which are the most important things in my life – I would have ended up somewhere else on a different path. But it’s the path I wanted, in my heart, to take – I just couldn’t figure out how I would survive living that way.

“You’re falling into the same trap you always do. Glorifying a past that never existed. The humanities has always appealed to a small subset of the population, usually some portion of elites that went to college back when very few people went to college.”

I have to say I agree somewhat with Meegles here, as somebody who also graduated from one of the small, orthodox, liberal arts colleges. I regretted staying at that school for a long time (I never regretted going, as that is where I met my husband and some of my other very best friends), probably because I am just too pragmatic by nature. Yes, I have read a lot of the Great Books. No, I did not feel particularly moved by most of them.

To be honest, I found more profound insights (and certainly far more joy) in my high school AP Lit class.

My husband, on the other hand, loved the education we received. At this point in my life (having gone back to school to gain pragmatic skills that have given me the ability to demand a salary that supports a family our size), I have the luxury of reaping some of the benefits of the liberal arts education I received. Namely, I can walk into any roomful of C-suite execs and feel at least as “smart” as they are (if not significantly more so). And I can certainly stand my own with intellectuals at any cocktail party.

But really, reading these books didn’t change who I am at some fundamental level, nor did they give me some great sense of appreciation for the world that I didn’t have before. If I had to choose between my Great Books education and the 2-year degree at the local tech college that I obtained in my early 30s, I’d take the tech college degree any day of the week. We have mouths to feed. And I’ve seen far too many of my fellow grads (as well as grads from the other orthodox liberal arts schools out there) in their 40s now, still believing how superior they are to the masses, while they live miserable, stressful marriages with 10 kids they can only afford to feed through WIC, food stamps, and other government help. (And let me be clear—I am all for these programs to help able-bodied people get themselves out of a rough patch–we were on WIC ourselves when I went back to school–but NOT as a way of life as you continue to have more children and complain about about the very government who continues to feed them.)

Really, how many people over the course of the millennia would have been that interested in reading Dante, even if they could read? Most people just want to make enough money to support their families well enough and enjoy a pint or two at the pub with friends every Saturday night. Intellectual life has always been for the few and probably always will be.

Also, I can’t be the only one who nearly got permanently turned off “the Humanities” because of some English teacher trying to convince me that Romeo & Juliet was the most wonderful love story in all of creation. Ditto for the English teacher to tried to convince me that Charles Dickens was the most fantastic literary figure EVAH. (Note: C.D. obviously got paid by the word. C.D. may be the best of the wordy Victorian novelists, but he’s still a wordy Victorian novelist.)

If we’re going to want to lay a good foundation for the humanities, let’s stuff our kids full of languages so that they can read the literature in the original, turn them on to history so they understand the context, take them to some good opera, and turn them loose in a well-stocked library.

Schlagerman wrote: Richard Feynman threatened to disown his son if his son pursued studies in philosophy, his first interest. He won came to his senses and switched to computer science. Modern philosophy apes science without the requisite knowledge of math and science. Studying the classics and displaying the knowledge to any degree makes someone between a freak and a bore. Study something practical and useful. People will have a buyer opinion of you.

To which I reply: I recently began reading the famous Feynman biography. It becomes clear within the first 100 pages that Feynman was really, really an idiot when it came to his own field; he was completely unaware of its dependence on some kind epistemology, which is of course a branch of philosophy.

Trotting out this anecdote and expecting it to be taken seriously is itself a violation of all scientific thinking norms; it’s basically an appeal to authority, which empirical science is supposed to not respect. It’s also like not just appealing to authority, but analogous to appealing to, say, Dawkins’ authority on religion; when even other more thoughtful atheists (John Gray, anyone?) basically think he’s completely ignorant in the area.

Feynman is a good example of being very bright in one small area, and amazingly unaware of how it fits into any larger context of human thought. Or to be more negative, he’s an argument that many great modern scientists are mere technocrat geniuses.

I think there are two related problems: Traditionally, humanities meant studying the “Great Books” in their original language. I think even STEM/Business people would agree that it is not a soft option to become sufficiently versed in two or more languages (traditionally Latin and Ancient Greek, but Italian, French, German, Russian would do) for such work. I am not a cognitive scientist and cannot describe it well but decoding complex and difficult (often poetic) text in a foreign language trains a certain skill set that is different from the ones trained in both maths and native language classes.

But for this one really has to start in middle school studying languages. And not just at the level to be able to buy a drink in Mexico. At least some of the “Great Books”, e.g. Virgil used to be high school/prep school content, not college.
This is not for everyone but while it seems obvious to have advanced classes for gifted 16-18 year olds learning calculus and complex numbers there are probably far less offers for pre-college studies of original language Voltaire, Virgil or Herodotus.
This used to be different. The most demanding non-STEM pre-college subjects are often gone (e.g. Classical languages) or have been watered down.

1) Critical thinking skills are important to whatever you do. Humanities can help sharpen them.

2) Humanities provide perspective on how and why to live your life.

3) Humanities aren’t enough. There still has to be substantive content, outside the humanities, that flesh out the framework humanities can provide. This could be hard science, business, working a production line on a factory floor… but humanities help put it all together and keep it all together.

4) Humanities are also useful, for those who are not sollipsists, in building relations with other human beings who also live here.

However, why is it necessary that college classes be the place to learn about Dante?

Indeed. During the era of the Western Federation of Miners, every mining camp in the Rockies had libraries of classical literature… and the miners read them and discussed them.

I have heard this line SEVERAL times from colleges as my kids and I have made the rounds of liberal arts colleges in the last few years. In fact, we learned to listen for it and nudge each other when it was parroted. It is TOTALLY self-serving on the part of the colleges, although perhaps the college employees who spout it are lying to themselves, and actually this think is true. But it’s what the colleges say to get families to keep spending thou$and$ on history, English, and political science majors. After all, it’s not as if prospective employers have any way to measure those qualities in job applicants.

This is no doubt also true. Every good thing can be scammed somehow. A twelfth cousin of mine has a daughter who got a degree in political science, attended a job fair on campus, and got a job as assistant manager at a Kohl’s department store.

My wife and I both attended a private, liberal arts college and received degrees in drama and American Studies–when it was fashionable in the seventies. Neither degree served financially when rearing a family, as was typical of our liberal arts peers. For a time, we felt we had been sold a lie. But, the older we get, the more we both appreciate our collegiate studies. Today, we have rich, intellectual lives and can think cogently in an age of superficiality and stupidity. It may not have paid off for us and our children in financial terms, but all one need do is consult Mortimer Adler for the litany of benefits which accrue from reading widely and studying the great conversation.

Like everyone else, I’m suspicious of these arguments from utility. At the same time, I worry about what’s being implied when we take up a defense of the humanities as a “transformative” force.

Are we sure we want to claim that the humanities will “change your life,” as Bauerlein says? Or that the humanities will thrive if professors were to be “witnesses”? This is religious language. I love the humanities, but I’m not sure we do them justice by burdening them with a religious mission. If we ask the humanities to save our lives or to find us when we are lost, we’re bound to be disappointed.

I am not criticizing Rod nor his claims about Dante. I think Rod would be the first to admit that it wasn’t Dante alone that saved his life. Or, rather, it was Dante, but it was Dante in conjunction with lots of other causes (some strictly personal) that aren’t “the humanities.”

Or, to put it another way: the modern university is totally incapable of reproducing the circumstances, experiences, and enlightenments that Rod found in Dante.

Semi-off-topic: I’m curious if Rod has ever read “Paradise Lost,” or if he’s looking for another “Great Book” to read? These Dante posts are kind of reminding me of reading that—not because I had the same profound emotional experience per se, but because it also touched on issues of personal liberty and morality in ways that I found fascinating. Satan continually sets himself up as this noble revolutionary against God’s tyranny, and it’s only other characters, plus some critical reading, that reminds you that he’s fooling himself.

Further to the point about professors as “witnesses”: When it was first proposed to include the study of English literature, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, in English universities — roughly in the 1880s — there was strong opposition. At Oxford, one faculty opponent said, “We are told that the study of literature ‘cultivates the taste, educates the sympathies and enlarges the mind.’ These are all excellent things, only we cannot examine tastes and sympathies. Examiners must have technical and positive information to examine.” As the contemporary critic Terry Eagleton wryly explains: The “definition of an academic subject was what could be examined, and since English was no more than idle gossip about literary taste it was difficult to know how to make it unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit. This, it might be said, is one of the few problems associated with the study of English which have since been effectively resolved.”

Of course, the first English professors didn’t say that their goal was to make studying literature unpleasant. But they did recognize that they were up against a prejudice that equated the professing of literature with letting a bunch of Rod Drehers loose in the halls of academe to rhapsodize about their favorite books and how life-changing they were. They knew they could never win broad support for literary education on that model; that’s just not what governments, donors, and financing agencies are going to pay for.

So what they did, starting in the 1880s with the organization of professional associations of literature professors, was pledge to make the study of literature “scientific.” They would analyze literature, they would historicize literature, they would theorize about literature, but they certainly wouldn’t witness about literature. Theories, histories and analyses were the kinds of “technical and positive information” that you could turn into examinations — the key measure of a legitimate university subject.

As I said earlier, this whole regime was briefly challenged, once, in the late ’60s. Otherwise, there’s really never been a time in the entire history of universities when the study of the humanities was seen as something to be done for the sake of appreciation or higher culture or the liberating of the human spirit. Universities arose in the first place as technical-training institutes in law, medicine, theology, and the various skills needed to run the affairs of medieval cities and royal courts. Harvard was originally founded for the training of Puritan ministers. The 19th-century colleges taught — in fact, required — the Classics, like Homer and Cicero, but reduced them either to grammatical sentence-parsing or to models of “elocution” of the kind that might be useful to ministers and lawyers. Then along came the “scientific” study of literature, which has taken various forms over the past 130 or so years but only very briefly, around about the 1920s, was about Great Books or Great Traditions; mostly it’s been different ways of making the subject suitably technical. A Great Books or “Masterpieces of Literature” approach persisted here and there, for a while, in undergraduate curricula — I went through an excellent example in the late ’70s — and there have been courses with titles like “Art Appreciation” aimed at fulfilling general-education requirements, but even these have all but invariably been weighed down with exams and paper assignments and deadlines and attendance requirements, thus ensuring that as few students as possible will experience their encounter with great works as occasions for delight or deep reflection.

And as I mentioned, there is absolutely no constituency for doing anything about this. The only people who tried, briefly, were on the left; the political right — which, of course, loves rules, requirements and the exercise of authority in general — scoffed at those experiments, because who knows what kinds of crazy things might happen if you actually turn people loose with good books and they “let it all hang out” and have possibly life-changing experiences? Anyway, the student movement that once agitated for “meaningful” education was dead already by the early ’70s, and the students of the time who became professors and administrators abandoned efforts to radically change the university itself and instead turned their radicalism in the trendy po-mo directions that I join conservatives in mocking today. But, as others have noted above, the humanities do live on, and by some measures are probably thriving — just not so much in universities, where the single most common sentence remains, “Will this be on the exam?”

Why is it an either/or thing? I work in Catholic education, and I am really quite interested in a classical model. I think it’s what I want for my children, both in terms of faith formation AND in terms of what it might do for their SAT scores. Maybe that shouldn’t matter, but parents care. And if it DOES help in that regard, then I ought to make that part of the sales package.

We do this all the time for other things. If you school doesn’t have an athletic program, you could make the case for investing in one in terms of wellness for some parents. Others might not care, and might react better to a discussion of teamwork and discipline. Still others might not care about either, but might be glad to hear, “Well, people in this town care about sports a lot. And if we bring in 20 of those kids paying full tuition, that will take the pressure off for higher tuition, or it might help pay for that chemistry lab you were looking at.” Still OTHERS might just think it’s a cool to get one over on the cross town rivals.

Know your audience, and pitch whichever appeals to them. If you have a parent who wants Johnny to get into Princeton no matter what, tell that parent how a classical approach does that, and how Latin will help on SATs, etc. If someone else wants to hear the whole “true, good and beautiful” pitch, GIVE IT TO HIM.

Some people want a Ferrari because it goes fast. Others think it will help them score chicks. Others want to impress the people at their 20th college reunion.

If you are the Ferrari salesman, be adept at pushing all of these buttons.

If academicians would present the humanities as romance, as mystery, as passion-filled voyages of discovery, as opposed to the dull, technocratic rationales given by these college presidents, maybe they would find more young people coming to embrace their study. If professors would rediscover why they fell in love with art and literature in the first place — the wonder of it all! — maybe they would convert others.

I’m not sure you know many academicians in the humanities. You know what? College and university humanities departments are teeming with professors who would love to present their fields with passion and romance. Do you know why college presidents take the instrumental view? It’s because in our modern economy, in order for anything to survive it has to be justified in terms of market returns. Anything that has worth has market worth, full stop.

There’s a vicious circle going on, too. Attendance at symphony orchestras has been diminishing for years. Many major US orchestras are on the brink of disappearing. Nobody in classical music has a definitive solution, but the diagnosis is that music and humanities education is disappearing, and now we’ve had at least two generations grow up thinking that the market value of classical music is that it is “relaxing.” Well, you can relax at home — why go to the symphony? So the field loses money, is seen as a market loser not worth devoting scarce education funds to, and then continues to decline.

There are plenty of other cultural things going on as well. You like Stravinsky more than Bob Dylan? You must be an elitist or a snob. Do you prefer Faulkner and Joyce to Steven King and J.K. Rowling? Same thing. But at heart, I think it’s an economic crisis in the arts and humanities. Good art really only emerges when all art is supported economically, and that can’t happen if everything is expected to be a market. I think the same thing is true of the humanities in general — a young woman who has all the intellectual tools to be a brilliant philosopher but who won’t be able to support herself in doing so is unlikely to go into philosophy unless she already comes from a family with means.

Increasingly in my field (music composition), the students who arrive as composers come from rich families. Some of this is that simple access to resources let them get a head start, but a huge part of it is that someone like me who came from a poor family better be sure they’ll be able to find work after they graduate, because they’ll be saddled with loans, and they’ll be facing an economic system that has already decided that what they have chosen to do with their life is worthless — maybe best left as a hobby.

A long time ago Rod promoted one of my posts to the main blog. Here it is for reference:

This is one of the (rather long) points I made, and it is also apposite in this conversation:

Re: Why aren’t there any great artists now?
Way too much ink has been spilled over this. The short answer is that a huge majority of art is crap. There’s a reason we don’t remember most of the thousands of Raphael’s contemporaries. But in our own time, we are unlikely to see more than a handful of great works among the hoards of mediocrity. We like to say that “history will separate the good from the bad,” and it’s true in two senses: it forgets the bad, but in some cases it also discovers the good, who were little-known or little-respected in their time.

The longer answer has to do with consumerism. There are many prudential reasons why an artistic genius might not actively pursue their art — it’s really hard to make a living at it even if you’re really good, since so much of success is a matter of luck and connections. While it seems unbelievable that a modern-day Haydn or Shakespeare wouldn’t go into music or playwriting, someone of slightly less drive to create (Sibelius, e.g.) would have lots of reasons to do something more secure.

Meanwhile, I think most people do not have enough interest or training in arts to to know how to engage them. There’s a persistent romanticism about it which imagines “the beholder” as totally passive — as though art were supposed to “wash over them” and do something to them. In reality, appreciating art takes a great deal of concentration and active engagement, and if you want to go below the surface at all you need a little training. We’ve become used to thinking of “a song” as too long if it is even just 5 minutes — and in most cases in pop music today, it’s true because the mass-produced music doesn’t have enough interesting material to sustain attention for 5 minutes.

We worry so much about “accessibility” that artists have tremendous pressure to create art that doesn’t offer any challenges to its audience. And members of the audience don’t feel any responsibility to meet the artist halfway and make an effort to understand. Even merely good art is hard to create under these circumstances.

In short, there just isn’t enough cultural infrastructure to support great art — and though it’s tempting to blame it all on modernist artists, it’s not all the artists’ fault.

I have often noticed that the best humanists are scientists who have discovered the limits of science. How does it fits with a reform of the teaching of humanities,I don’t know.
What I know is that until recently, the half-witted were amateur psychologists of sociologists. At some point, they all became amateur scientists, herded by similarly half-witted professional scientists.
Since scientism is today’s worst enemy of reason, having a strong scientific background is necessary for humanists wanting to fight back.

In my home town of Tampa, the cigar industry once flourished. The cigar workers were imported from various spanish speaking cultures in which an appreciation of the liberal arts and literature remains quite widespread. These workers arrived from Cuda, Spain, South America with a tradition of thinking of themselves as skilled craftsmen. In the center of the cigar factory sat el lector, a man who was usually college educated and fluent in Spanish Italian and Portugese. The job of el lector was to read to the cigar workers from news stories in the current press abd selections of great literature. The lectors were highly respected and well paid. A simple cigar worker over the course of a few years would gain the equivalent of a BA degree in the humanities throuh what was a great books program. As he ownership of these factories passed from Spanish or Cuban ownership, the new American owners were horrified at the thought that a lector was educating their workforce. Eventually, the lectors were slowly purged from their positions after considerable resistance from the cigar workers. Such a tradition would be unthinkable in the modern world. See http://tbo.com/lifestyle/readers-played-important-role-in-cigar-factories-616780

“It is clear that to thrive in a society where [college graduates] may have up to six different careers, business and STEM graduates need also to be curious and creative, to be critical thinkers…”
>> We have reached a point where liberal arts education is under such scrutiny that many people have decided the only way to redeem a college education is to forget the subjective self-indulgent liberal arts and concentrate on the meritocratic STEM fields.

Liberal arts people in turn are concerned that this second class status for their fields, as the quote above suggests, is bad for STEM students who also need exposure to liberal arts to turn them into well-rounded great minds.

But let us remember that once upon a time, a Renaissance man was a scientist, philosopher and artist all in one. Even over the last 100 years, as science became an arena of increasingly specialized experts, leading scientists continue to also make for influential philosophers (especially physicists, for some reason).

But this only seems to go in one direction: PhDs in science fields are also philosophers or artists of distinction; but I can’t think of any PhD in social theory or humanities who is also known for his/her scientific work (and we know many who have little capacity for rational thought).

“What sophomore will be drawn to a course in Renaissance sculpture because it will enhance her critical thinking skills?”
>> I see this ‘critical thinking skills’ thrown around a lot, even in reference to elementary school kids. Keep in mind that ‘critical thinking’ can mean essential ideas, or it can mean critical theory’s idea of critical.

Renaissance sculpture doesn’t do much for essential ideas, but a sculpture of the Mona Lisa as a pre-op tranny undergoing hormone therapy is critical theory gold– instant Ivy League teaching offers for the Continuing Education community college student who comes up with this one.

When it was first proposed to include the study of English literature, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, in English universities — roughly in the 1880s — there was strong opposition. At Oxford, one faculty opponent said, “We are told that the study of literature ‘cultivates the taste, educates the sympathies and enlarges the mind.’ These are all excellent things, only we cannot examine tastes and sympathies. Examiners must have technical and positive information to examine.”

In this regard, I must note that I have always questioned reading and literature appreciation classes (in the K-12 context), because there is no right way to read or understand a book or a short story or a poem. Up to a point, introducing students to such things may be beneficial, but the way the educational gurus try to design exercises and tests around literature, and “test” students on whether they “properly” understood, analyzed or interpreted the story is absolutely ludicrous.

The decline in the humanities is due to multiple factors. One of the prime factors are the publish or perish pressures operating within academe. It is frankly impossible for humanities scholars to publish at the rate of faculty within the sciences. Unlike the natural sciences or social and behavioral sciences, the body of knowledge within the humanities has remained relatively static. The vast explosion of basic knowledge and information in more scientifically orienteddisciplines such as physics, biology, anthropology, psychology, or neuroscience dwarfs anything found in the humanities. However, faculty and scholars in cademe who work in the humanities are under the same pressure to publish as their colleagues in science disciplines. Parity is extraordinarily difficult to achieve Frankly, barring the discovery of new folio of Shakespeare’s plays, what else can be said about Shakespeare that is “cutting edge” research for which we should award tenure? Consequently, scholars working in the humanities have to resort to a endless cycle of demolition and reinterpretation of the Canon to maintain publication rates in acadenic journals nobody actualy reads. In order to do this, they often resort to the importation of ideas from other disciplines into the humanities . In the case of post-modernism, this was used to destroy the Canon. As a result, if you look at the faculty interests found within our major research universities, in the literature departments you will find scholars who are extremely interested in gender theory, queer theory, classical Freudian theory, Marxism, and post-colonial epistemologies.. Because the time it takes these concepts to migrate across the quad into the humanities departments, these ideas and perspectives and typically have typically died out in the disciplines in which they originated. For example, gender theory is quite passé in the field of psychology because the empirical scientific data do not support many of the fundamental presuppositions of gender theory. However, gender theory is alive and well in English literature departments across the country. The same can be said of Marxism whch has faied as an economic theory. However, the Marxist critique is alive and well within iterary theory. The result is that the humanities at our elite institutions more closely resembles the elephant’s grave yard of outmoded, archaic ideas. Concepts and perspectives which have long died out in the disciplines which originated them live on in a strange, bizarre, posthumus, existence in the literature and English departments. . For this reason, I advocate an approach to the humanities rooted in a conservatory model of education in which the treasures of the past are preserved and passed on, rather than a model rooted in the sciences.